Nigeria, April 1 -- IT WAS the strongly counterintuitive nature of my initial interest in Peter Obi and the Obidients that made me almost instantly a dedicated observer of the man and the movement. As the term implies, to be counterintuitive is to go against intuition and normal expectations and yet be correct in so doing. In a typical counterintuitive act, all the usual expectations and calculations prompt you to move ahead but you move back. Or you are prompted to ignore or pay little attention to an event but something tells you that it would be better to pay careful attention to it.

Obi and the Obidients burst into the 2023 electoral cycle with the announcement that they were going to put "production" back into Nigerian capitalism, t...